Macbook restarts when touched

Ok i have been very puzzled about this. This happened about a year ago and would happen when i closed the lid. Determined it to be the video cable so i replaced it and every thing worked fine until about a month age. I have already determined that my 1 year old 500gb hard drive had died which was causing a kernel panic, but now it is something else as well. I am going to be fiddling with it for the next hour or so but what I have now noticed is if I set it on my knee or something balancing it in the middle of the laptop and gently press on both the left and the right side (basically making it bend ever so slightly), it will freeze until i let go and if for more than a second or two, it will kernel panic.

I am a tech and have seen this on an HP before and was a defect in the intel chipset. Is there this issue on the macbooks? Also do you think it could be the palmrest, because this all started to happen after the last time I had the palmrest changed because of the cracking defect?

Here is a little about my macbook:
MacBook Late 2007
MacBook3,1
Core 2 Duo 2.0 Ghz
4GB Memory

It could be anything... There are a myriad of cables that snake their way from the logic board and other components up to the display area through the hinge. When you bend the machine it could be causing a minute crack in a trace to separate or a cable getting pinched or pulled away from its connector.

You own one of the early Intel MacBooks so any defect in the chipset would have shown up long ago.